declared himself, was so attentive to Natalie that the world
considered him as courting her. Neither mother nor daughter appeared
to be thinking of marriage. Mademoiselle Evangelista preserved towards
Paul the reserve of a great lady who can make herself charming and
converse agreeably without permitting a single step into intimacy.
This reserve, so little customary among provincials, pleased Paul
immensely. Timid men are shy; sudden proposals alarm them. They
retreat from happiness when it comes with a rush, and accept
misfortune if it presents itself mildly with gentle shadows. Paul
therefore committed himself in his own mind all the more because he
saw no effort on Madame Evangelista's part to bind him. She fairly
seduced him one evening by remarking that to superior women as well as
men there came a period of life when ambition superseded all the
earlier emotions of life.

"That woman is fitted," thought Paul, as he left her, "to advance me
in diplomacy before I am even made a deputy."

If, in all the circumstances of life a man does not turn over and over
both things and ideas in order to examine them thoroughly under their
different aspects before taking action, that man is weak and
incomplete and in danger of fatal failure. At this moment Paul was an
optimist; he saw everything to advantage, and did not tell himself
than an ambitious mother-in-law might prove a tyrant. So, every
evening as he left the house, he fancied himself a married man,
allured his mind with its own thought, and slipped on the slippers of
wedlock cheerfully. In the first place, he had enjoyed his freedom too
long to regret the loss of it; he was tired of a bachelor's life,
which offered him nothing new; he now saw only its annoyances; whereas
if he thought at times of the difficulties of marriage, its pleasures,